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These days are either the most trying time for encouraging employee engagement or the best we could expect With so many people trying to work remotely, many businesses need extra ways to communicate with the rank and file, and this might present a prime opportunity to try new things....
I am always fascinated by edge conditions and the change they drive. Some people use the word "margin" because it's at the margin that things change. A situation or condition exists more or less in equilibrium with the rest of its environment until in one way or another the stresses of the situation become so great that change happens. We have lot...
Life goes on, though I keep thinking about the coronavirus and its impact on business, which is substantial. I am wondering if it's time to count our blessings even as we remain vigilant At this point the number of active cases in the U.S. is still small, relative to the population, though the bug has an annoying ability to do math in the form of e...
Someday a future Monty Python comedy troupe will reprise the plague scene from the Holy Grail in which a character pushes a cart through a street shouting "Bring out your dead!" only to discover one who isn't dead yet. What will be funny about our era? Perhaps it will have something to do with overreacting to the situation by reordering society, a...
Several conferences I was scheduled to attend have been canceled in the past week. All of the sponsors cited an abundance of caution in the face of the unknown consequences of coronavirus transmission and outright COVID-19 pneumonia That's all to the good, but we need to get business done even in the face of the virus because business has to propel...
The coronavirus scare is working its way through the economy -- I'm talking about the real economy, not the stock market -- even affecting CRM. At this point some vendors are canceling events rather than taking the risk of having thousands of customers, press and analysts descend on a city, swap microbes through the air for a few days, then go hom...
Franchising is a tried-and-true business model with numerous permutations that benefit all participating parties For the vendor it's a great model for expanding without all of the downside risk associated with building a business, like finding all the financing and hiring people. The franchisor generally sells licenses to willing partners who agree...
Salesforce this week announced it would buy Vlocity -- a startup with all the markings of a unicorn, including a billion-dollar valuation -- for US$1.33 billion. A lot of other news came out of the company too, including co-CEO Keith Block stepping down and another record revenue and earnings announcement, but I'll focus here on the Vlocity story V...
Brightback, a San Francisco-based company focused on customer retention for subscription businesses, recently published a report on customer churn and what more than 400 subscription companies say they're doing about it Its findings are in line with many other sources I've been writing about recently, and the data deserves an examination....
CRM is an industry that's been full of turning points, and I think it is at another. There have been many smaller turns, like the additions of analytics, social media, and process flow. However, to get a sense of this point in time, I think you have to go all the way back to the turn of the century and the rise of cloud computing The cloud was impo...
Clayton Christensen died last week, and we should care. He was the Harvard Business School professor who wrote The Innovator's Dilemma and changed the world, certainly the part we inhabit in CRM. He was only 67 Christensen did more than anyone to plant the idea of disruptive innovation in the minds of people in the tech industry. Before Christensen...
It's hard to say with any specificity where the CRM market will move this year, but I'm a pundit so let me try anyway. After more than two decades, CRM has landed in the business landscape and spread out in impressive ways. When CRM emerged in the late 1990s social media didn't exist, and the idea of social networking was confined to a few papers ...
For the last 15 years I've written year end articles on where we've been and where we're going in CRM and more broadly in tech. This year, as I went through the pieces I wrote, it struck me that the major topics that were important in 2019 would be equally important in 2020. In my mind there are several clusters of things that have sticking power....
We're used to discussing mergers and acquisitions in the tech sector, but splitting a company into two parts is a rarity. Analysts always have to ask who benefits and how? Shareholders? Other stakeholders, including customers? Employees? Why does this not happen more often? Surely businesses outgrow their markets' demands, but more often than not ...
Business-to-business marketing is evolving -- and it's not just the industry itself. Vendor marketing efforts with customers can and should evolve as well. When you see a vendor selected repeatedly, or it officially earns a designation as a preferred vendor, it's a sign of marketing evolution Most B2B marketing efforts begin from a cold start. Eith...
There were more than 170,000 people at Dreamforce a couple of weeks ago, and many more watching from afar. Also, there were well over 2,000 sessions (full disclosure, I led a panel discussion on employee engagement). Numerous announcements sprang from the big Salesforce event. Some announcements and sessions, like the Tim Cook fireside chat, stand...
With Dreamforce only days away, it's no surprise that Salesforce is making a flurry of announcements. What is surprising is that there are two big ones this week involving partnering with other vendors, mostly on infrastructure -- announcements that I believe make the idea of an information utility more real with each passing day On Wednesday, ther...
I've been imposing on the world sharing my theory on the formation of an information utility for some time now. Various big vendors have announced alliances with that kind of aim For instance, Oracle and Microsoft earlier this year announced an effort to make their cloud databases interoperate, and Microsoft and others have announced common data mo...
Dreamforce is next week. Once again, the sold-out show will be headquartered at San Francisco's Moscone Center and overflowing to the ballrooms of neighboring hotels. Over the years Dreamforce has become the Las Vegas of trade shows in one important respect. Both are famous for being bastions of excess. Vegas has excesses of the sensual kind, while Dreamforce offers a business and technology equivalent.
We've been watching the CRM-ization of healthcare for a while. A few years ago, Salesforce embarked on parallel paths. The obvious option was to build tools that enabled users to craft systems of engagement. The second started when the company also began reaching out to various industrial sectors with its technology and those of some partners The r...
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